


Family Reunions

by accidentallymelted



Series: You Can't Take The Sky From Me [5]
Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-25
Updated: 2013-08-25
Packaged: 2017-12-24 16:24:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/942055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/accidentallymelted/pseuds/accidentallymelted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“This is not what I thought I would be doing on our shore leave,” Matt hissed in Cammie’s ear as they waited on her mother’s doorstep.</p>
<p>“Tough,” she muttered under her breath. “You said you would do this. Don’t you dare back out on me now.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Family Reunions

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HelenOrvana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HelenOrvana/gifts).



> Written for HelenOrvana, who prompted me with "Cam Atkinson/Matt Calvert, fake dating or kidfic." I tried to google Cam Atkinson's family but could not find anything except that he has four brothers (whose names I could not find) so I've invented a family for him here. Any resemblance to real people is completely coincidental.

“This is not what I thought I would be doing on our shore leave,” Matt hissed in Cammie’s ear as they waited on her mother’s doorstep.

“Tough,” she muttered under her breath. “You said you would do this. Don’t you dare back out on me now.”

“I won’t,” he said, just as the door swung open. Anything else he might have wanted to say was lost as Cammie’s mother shrieked.

“Cammie! You came!”

“I said I would,” Cammie said, dry and a little muffled as her mother hugged her. “Ow, Mom, I can’t breathe-“

Her mother released her abruptly and turned to Matt, getting a gleam in her eyes that made him distinctly nervous. “And this must be your young man.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, every inch the polite boy from a border moon. Cammie’s mother looked him over, sharp-eyed, before nodding approvingly.

“Come in, come in, you two. Sorry about the mess,” she said, ushering them into the house and shutting the door behind them. The house, so calm and peaceful looking from the outside, was actually barely contained chaos. Family members were shouting back and forth across the house while small children ran around underfoot, shrieking at the tops of their lungs and chasing each other back and forth. “It’s been a little busy.”

“I can see that,” Matt said, wide-eyed.

Cammie rolled her eyes at him and muttered “Brace yourself,” as her mother drew in a deep breath.

“Everyone! Cammie and her young man are here!”

Matt’s eyes grew even wider as people began pouring into the entryway of the house, hugging Cammie and shaking his hand. There was a babble of introductions that he didn’t manage to catch, too overwhelmed by the flood of people, most of whom gave him highly speculative looks. Cammie looked completely comfortable, laughing and greeting all of her relatives in turn, answering a couple shouted questions about their travels.

The crush died down after a while, with relatives drifting off or being shooed off by Cammie’s mother, back to whatever they’d been doing before. Only a few people lingered in the entryway, a man with Cammie’s nose and chin who must be her father, and a young woman wearing a beleaguered expression who had to be her sister. Her father swung her up in his arms and spun her around, ignoring her squawks of protest.

“It’s good to see you, Cammie-bird,” he said, finally putting her down and beaming at her.

“ _Dad_ ,” she said, turning red as Matt grinned. He’d have to remember that one.

“And this is your young man?” he continued, turning to Matt and shaking his hand. He had a very firm grip, Matt noted, smiling and trying not to wince as his hand was almost crushed.

“Mom, Dad, this is Matt,” Cammie said, grabbing his hand. “Matt, this are my parents.”

“Very nice to meet you,” he said. “Cammie’s told me a lot about you.” She had, in the last half an hour or so, as she tried to prep him for his part.

“I’m pleased to be able to say that it’s mutual. Call me Darla, please, and this is Tim,” her mother said. “And this is Mira.”

Cammie’s sister came forward to shake his hand as well, before turning to Cammie and giving her a long, fierce hug. “Thank you so much for coming,” she said. “It means a lot to me.”

“I wouldn’t have missed it,” Cammie said, returning the hug with equal fervour.

“She was very insistent,” Matt said ruefully, remembering the week-long argument between Cammie and Jack that Cammie had won by finally saying that she would rob the safe and _charter_ a flight if he couldn’t drop her off. Jack had finally thrown his hands up in the air and told Wiz to plot a course for Osiris, muttering about heads harder than granite. It had helped that Macy had taken her side and badgered and bullied Jack into agreeing. The rest of the crew had stayed well out of it, understanding both Jack’s desire to stay off of a planet with such a strong Alliance presence, especially with Gaborik still on board, and Cammie’s determination to attend her sister’s wedding.

“I can only imagine,” Tim said, dry. His daughter shot him a glare and punched Matt in the arm.

“Shut it,” she ordered, and Matt made a zipping motion in front of his mouth, grinning. “Mom, what do you need us to do?”

Darla sighed. “I hate to ask it of you, you must be exhausted.”

“We’re not, really,” Matt said, and Cammie nodded. They’d arrived on-planet yesterday because Wiz had been determined to give them time to “do something fun”, so it wasn’t like they’d been traveling non-stop.

“Do you mind taking the kids?” Darla said, eyes betraying a slight sense of desperation. “They’ve been running around like hooligans all day, getting in everyone’s way-“

“Not a problem,” Cammie said firmly. “We’d be happy to get the kids out of the house.”

“Thank you,” both Darla and Mira said fervently. “Everything will go so much faster,” Mira said as Darla turned back into the house and began calling names. After a few moments, a gaggle of children ranging in age from what looked like 4 to 12 had collected in the hallway. Matt eyed them with no small amount of trepidation – he was an only child, and working on a spaceship didn’t offer any opportunities to interact with kids.

“This is your cousin Cammie and her boyfriend, Matt,” Darla told the children. “They’re going to take you somewhere.” The children – there were about seven of them – turned speculative eyes on their cousin and her ‘boyfriend.’

“I remember you,” said one of the older boys, finally. Cammie grinned at him and bent down to get a good look at him.

“I remember you too,” she said. “You’re Kev, right? You were a lot smaller the last time I saw you.”

He nodded. “Where’d you go?” he asked. “You haven’t been here in years.”

“I was working on a spaceship,” Cammie said matter-of-factly. His eyes, and those of all of the other children, widened comically.

“You work on a _spaceship?_ ” he breathed.

“I sure do,” Cammie said, winking at him. “Matt does too. Why don’t we head out to the backyard, and we’ll tell you all about it?”

This was apparently acceptable. The older children whooped excitedly as they hurried out to the backyard, followed by the younger children, who seemed mostly to be excited that their cousins were excited. Darla and Mira watched them go with indulgent expressions on their faces.

“Thank you, again,” Darla said, hugging Cammie around the shoulders. “I really appreciate it.”

“Not a problem, Mom,” Cammie said, hugging her mother back before throwing Matt a grin. “You ready for this?”

“No,” he muttered, but followed her out into the backyard anyway.

 

0o0o0o0o0

 

Kids, Matt was discovering, had seemingly _inexhaustible_ stores of questions.

Cammie was telling them a heavily edited version of one of their “adventures,” as she called them. She had quite a knack for storytelling – even Matt found himself getting caught up in the action, and he’d _been_ there. He knew how this story ended – with Jack and Dubi finally managing to talk Artem and Macy out of jail – but he still found himself irritated when someone interrupted Cammie every five seconds to ask another question.

“Really in jail?” asked one of the younger children, wide-eyed. Cammie nodded seriously.

“Really in jail,” she promised. “We didn’t know that, of course – the captain thought they’d just gotten lost, so he wasn’t really worried about them. Except it kept getting later and later, and they still weren’t back yet, so eventually we all went out looking for them.”

“Did you find them?” one of the older girls asked, looking worried. Cammie grinned at her.

“We certainly found where they’d been,” she said, tossing Matt an amused look. The two of them had been the search group that had encountered the destruction Macy and Artem had wreaked. Matt had been so horrified that he’d made them stop and help the shopkeeper clean up, which had been the only reason they’d managed to find out what had become of their missing crew members.

“What happened?” The youngest child there, a boy who looked to be about four years old, looked up at Matt beseechingly. He looked back down, confused, only to find that all of the children were looking at him now.

“Yeah, Matt, what happened then?” Cammie asked, a huge shit-eating grin on her face. He resisted the urge to flip her off in front of the children and looked down at his audience.

“Well,” he began. “I noticed that one of the shops in the marketplace looked like it had been run into by a ship. The shopkeeper was this little older lady, and I felt bad about it, so we went in to see if she needed any help.”

0o0o0o0o0

“You know, you’re not as bad with them as you think you are,” Cammie murmured later as the two of them supervised a spirited game of Spacers and Pirates. Matt had been trying to follow the game but the lack of anything resembling rules had left him hopelessly lost, so now he was just watching to make sure no one was being seriously injured.

“Hmm?” he said, turning his head to look at her. She was watching him thoughtfully, her head tilted slightly to the side as she leaned back on her elbows.

“The kids. I saw you tense up, earlier, when Mom asked us to watch them. But you’re really not bad with them.”

“I have no idea what I’m doing,” he confessed, but she just laughed at him.

“No one has any idea what they’re doing, Matt,” she said, letting her head fall back and looking up at the sky, which was a beautiful shade of bright blue. “Everyone’s just making it up as they go along. Not even their parents have any clue.”

“How did you get so good with kids?” he asked, curious. He’d known her for almost four years now, ever since they’d joined the crew of the _Blue Jacket_ , and he’d never known that she had this side to her. Everyone knew that Cammie had a family that she waved on the regular, but she didn’t talk about them much. Which was weird, because Cammie talked about everything.

“I’m the oldest cousin,” she said, still staring at the clouds. “My mom has a lot of sisters, but she was the first one to get married and start having kids, and I’m the oldest. It took them a little longer,” she said, rolling over and looking up at him, “but eventually my aunts got married and started having kids too, and there was already my sister – you’ll have noticed that we tend toward women in my family,” Matt hadn’t noticed, really, but now he thought about it there might be a few more girls than boys in the crowd. “And since I was the oldest, I was the one who got the job of looking after all of them when the family got together. They were pretty little then, but I was getting old enough to be trusted with them, so. I can change a mean diaper.”

Matt laughed, startled, and Cammie swatted at him lazily. “I could, anyway. It’s not a skill I’ve had to exercise a lot recently. But yeah. I was getting older, and it’s not like I minded looking after the kids, but a few of my aunts started making noise about how it was good ‘practice,’ like I was going to finish school and settle down with someone and start popping out babies of my own any day now.” Her voice turned a little bitter, and Matt made a wordless sound of comfort and nudged her lightly with his shoulder. She smiled up at him, and while it wasn’t as sunny as normal it wasn’t a fake smile either. “I may have shouted something like that at my mother, after a particularly stressful get-together. It was not pleasant.”

“So you ran away to become a spacer?” Matt asked, curious. Cammie made a scoffing sound.

“No, my mother shouted back that she’d never wanted me to do anything except be myself, whether that meant settling down and having babies or shaving my head and starting a mechanic’s shop in the city. We both cried about it, and when we were done I said that I didn’t really want to do either of those things, and she asked me what I did want to do. So I told her I wanted to be a spacer, and she cried about it some more. But eventually she and my dad helped me look for a ship that was hiring, and I ended up on the Blue Jacket. You know the rest,” she said, dropping her head back down and resting it on the ground.

“So why-“

“Am I making you pretend to be my boyfriend?” Cammie finished his sentence and sighed, flopping dramatically onto her back. “Just because my mother supports me doesn’t mean that she doesn’t want to see me with some nice boy,” she said, eyes shut against the late afternoon sunlight. “And if I didn’t have a date, my aunts would spend the entire wedding clucking and trying to set me up with ‘nice young men,’” she made a face at the phrase. “And I didn’t want that – it’s Mira’s wedding, she deserves all the attention on her.”

“Ahh.” Matt turned his attention back to the game of Spacers and Pirates and frowned. “Hey, Steph, knock it off! No headlocks!” He gave the offending children his best stern stare until they separated. Cammie was giggling quietly next to him, and he poked her in the side. “What’s so funny?”

“You. You’re such an old woman,” she said, sounding delighted by this discovery. Matt frowned and poked her harder.

“I am not, _Camilla_.”

She sat up so fast Matt thought she might have strained something. “Who told you that?”

He smirked at her. “Your Great-Aunt Meredith,” he said. “She came out earlier, when you were telling the kids that story about when Jack locked himself in the engine room, and gave me quite the talk. She’s kind of terrifying,” he said reflectively. “Said if I hurt you they’d never find the body.”

Cammie flopped back down, an arm thrown up over her face in a gesture of despair. “She is,” she agreed, although it was slightly muffled. “She used to captain a mercenary troop. Retired about 30 years ago to marry Great-Uncle Dom. But she never lost that edge. They probably wouldn’t ever find your body, not that they’d even bother to start looking. Great-Uncle Dom was the Governor for years, and he still has a lot of friends in local law enforcement.”

“Your family,” Matt said after a few moments of thoughtful silence, “makes _so much about you_ make sense. I’m glad I came.”

“I’m glad you came, too,” Cammie said, giving him a soft smile before pushing herself up off the ground and offering him a hand up. “You still have to dance with me at the reception.”

“What kind of fake boyfriend would I be if I didn’t?” Matt asked, taking her hand and giving it a squeeze before letting her pull him up.

“No kind at all,” she agreed. “Now c’mon and help me round up the brats. It’s dinnertime, and I bet you’ve never tasted anything like my mom’s cooking.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you're interested you can follow me on tumblr (I'm accidentallymelted over there as well), where I reblog anything that catches my fancy and sometimes post writing updates, snippets, or prompt requests.


End file.
